Syracuse, N.Y. — Syracuse basketball coach Jim Boeheim opened up about his involvement in a fatal crash that killed a 51-year-old man earlier this year in a profile for Esquire.

In the October issue of Esquire, Boeheim recalls the crash, telling Tom Chiarella that he’s received plenty of support since.

“The crazy thing is, I’ve had five hundred emails, minimum — perfectly serious — more than five hundred emails from people that had the same thing happen to them," Boeheim said. "The testimony, the inquest, or whatever — it’s hard. And it should be hard. They looked into it. Every minute was accounted for.”

Boeheim talked plenty of basketball, too, specifically the transfer portal and the NBA. Many experts expected larger programs like Syracuse to benefit heavily from players transferring from smaller schools to a Power 5 conference, but in reality lots of high-level players simply shuffle to a new school with the hopes to play more.

“I think it’s great for kids to go if that’s what they really want, but what if they just work through it?" Boeheim said. "Would it have worked out better? Brandon Triche played very little here when he was a freshman and he became a great player for us. We had a kid leave here and go to Vanderbilt, he didn’t play, and Vanderbilt didn’t win a conference game last year.”

Boeheim mentions that impatience has really hurt college basketball, with many players trying to get to the NBA as fast as possible. The solution? Money.

“What we’ve needed to do is give kids more money, which we have," he said. "People don’t realize that. Nobody writes this. These kids get paid. My son gets $1,300 a month. He’s a scholarship player because we give him cost of attendance.”

Debating the zone vs. man-to-man defense has become a tradition in Central New York, and Boeheim tells Esquire that his reluctance to play man-to-man is all about time management in practice.

The Orange would have to dedicate valuable amounts of time to practicing man-to-man and the skills needed to succeed with it, and that’s difficult to do while playing zone full-time. It’s also not as simple as experimenting either, he says.

“This isn’t an experiment,” Boeheim said. “You only get one chance, and if you experiment during a game that you need to win and you lose it because you experimented, what did you learn? And then you miss the tournament by one game? It’s not good.”